In this special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, the editors stepped outside the sometimes narrow confines of technical academic writing. They sought contributors who were willing to dive into an honest, open discussion of Mexico’s cultural history. The result is a vigorous, complex, innovative, and occasionally humorous discussion of the pros and cons of a new cultural historical approach to Mexican history. All the contributors to this issue agree on the importance and relevance of a historical study of culture in its most inclusive sense. But there is much less consensus about the promise and potential of a new cultural history of Mexico and Latin America. While some of the contributors celebrate new interpretive and methodological advances, others express concern about the dangers of overinterpretation, untoward speculation, and the imposition of postmodernist concepts.Contributors and topics covered include:
Susan Deans-Smith and Gilbert M. Joseph on the Arena of Dispute
Eric Van Young on the New Cultural History
William E. French on Cultural History of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Mary Kay Vaughan on Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution Stephen Haber on Mexico’s New Cultural History Florencia E. Mallon on Cycles of Revisionism
Susan Migden Socolow on Putting the Cult in Culture
Claudio Lomnitz on the Politics of the New Cultural History of Mexico